Oracle® Files

Release Notes

Release 9.0.3 for Solaris Operating System (SPARC)

August 2002

Part No. B10050-01

1 Overview

This document is accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time of publication. Information that is discovered subsequent to publication will be available through regular support channels. For updates and additions, please see the Oracle Collaboration Suite Release Notes Addendum on the Oracle Technology Network at:

http://otn.oracle.com

This document is specific to Release 9.0.3 of Oracle Files for Solaris Operating System (SPARC). It includes the following topics:

2 Introducing Oracle Files

A key component of the Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Files is designed as an enterprise file server replacement, with added content management features (for example, versioning) that enables users to collaborate more productively.

Oracle Files includes:

Support for file-sharing and collaboration.

A Web UI designed for ease-of-use and large-scale deployments.

Workspace-based collaboration.

Content management features like categories, versioning, and content-based searching.

Workflow integration for approval and routing.

User and administrator options for single file recovery.

Scalability, reliability, security, and platform independence.

These features and capabilities are designed to help IT managers lower costs through file server consolidation while simultaneously making employees more productive.

3 Certification and System Requirements

Several high priority bugs are fixed in the 9.0.1.3 release of Oracle9i Database Server. You should upgrade to this release of the database as soon as it is available.

3.1 Client Certifications

The following client software has been tested and certified for Oracle Files:

3.1.2 Apple Macintosh

Netscape Communicator 4.73 release and higher (Netscape 6.x is not supported in this release)

Microsoft Outlook Express 5.0

3.1.3 UNIX NFS Client Support

Sun Solaris 2.6, Solaris 7, Solaris 8

Red Hat Linux 6.2

4 General Issues

Here are some general operations and administration issues you should be aware of before using Oracle Files.

4.1 Oracle Files User Names Cannot Contain Multi-byte Characters

Although Oracle Files supports multi-byte character sets, it does not effectively support user account names created using multi-byte characters. When you create user accounts for Oracle Files, you should create the names using single-byte characters only. Users whose account names are created with multi-byte characters are unable to access content through many of the Oracle Files protocol servers.

5 NLS Issues

Here are some issues relevant to Oracle Files and National Language Support (NLS).

5.1 Jagged Bold/Italic Fonts

When running in Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean environments, bold or italicized fonts in the Java applications appear jagged, and are difficult to read. This problem is visible for all Java applications, including Configuration Assistants, Oracle FileSync, and the Admin browser.

This issue is caused by problems in the 1.3.1_02b version of the JDK, and can be resolved by moving to JDK 1.3.1_04. This problem will be fixed in future releases of the product.

See also known bugs 2377003, 2293628, and Base Oracle bug 2220343

5.2 Character Set Limitations

Oracle Files does not support AL32UTF-8 databases for Asian languages. Oracle9i Text does not support Chinese, Japanese, and Korean lexers on AL32UTF-8 databases. On such databases, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean documents will not be indexed or searchable. UTF-8 is the recommended character set for Unicode-based file systems. See also known bugs 2391425 and 1926886.

6 Oracle Internet Directory Issues

See the Oracle Internet Directory Release Notes for complete information on all known issues. This section covers only those issues specific to Oracle Files. Note that several bugs listed later, in the "Configuration Bugs" section, will be fixed by upgrading the database instance supporting Oracle Internet Directory to release 9.0.1.3 of the Oracle9i Database Server as soon as it is available.

6.1 Use Oracle Files-specific Passwords with Certain Protocol Servers

Many protocols, including AFP and FTP, transmit unencrypted passwords over the network. Other protocols, such as HTTP and SMB, also transmit user passwords in the clear (unencrypted, as cleartext) in some configurations.

From a security standpoint, transmitting unencrypted passwords becomes a concern when Oracle Files uses Oracle Internet Directory to manage user passwords because the same password that provides access to Oracle Files also provides access to all other applications using Oracle Internet Directory for authentication.

To address this issue, Oracle Internet Directory supports an alternate, application-specific password for each user. Oracle Files supports this feature of Oracle Internet Directory. The alternate password for Oracle Files is referred to as the "Oracle Files-specific password." Thus, each Oracle Files user can have two passwords: an Oracle Internet Directory common password, and an Oracle Files-specific password.

You can configure Oracle Files to use the Oracle Internet Directory common password or to use the Oracle Files-specific password on a protocol-by-protocol basis. By default, AFP and FTP use the Oracle Files-specific password; all other protocols use the Oracle Internet Directory common password. Consequently, users cannot access Oracle Files using AFP or FTP protocols until they have set their Oracle Files-specific password, using either Oracle Enterprise Manager or the Oracle Files Web user interface. See the Oracle Collaboration Suite Installation Guide for additional information.

The default configuration may not be appropriate for all Oracle Files deployments. You can change the configuration using the Oracle Files Credential Manager Configuration Assistant. See the Oracle Collaboration Suite Installation Guide for additional information.

Oracle Files relies on the Provisioning Integration Service provided by the Directory Integration Platform to be notified of user and group changes in Oracle Internet Directory. These changes are stored in the Oracle Internet Directory change log and are appropriately filtered by the Provisioning Integration Service before being delivered as change events to this application. Even if you are not deploying the Oracle Internet Directory server in replication mode, make sure that the directory administrator starts up the replication server in order to periodically purge unnecessary change-log entries.

This can be done by starting the replication server using the following command:

Without this periodic cleanup, the Oracle Internet Directory change-log can potentially grow to occupy the entire file system, which may cause unavailability of the Oracle Internet Directory service. The need to start the replication server to purge the change-log is only a temporary restriction and will be removed in a future release.

For more information on starting and stopping the replication server, see Oracle Internet Directory Administrator's Guide.

7 Client-specific Issues

Here are some client-specific issues that you should be aware of before using Oracle Files.

7.1 Oracle FileSync Utility

The FileSync utility is able to detect changes made by you on your local machine and by you or others on Oracle Files and, generally, is able to resolve any conflict in these changes. However, certain types of changes may conflict and cannot currently be resolved by FileSync. In these cases, FileSync only gives you the option to "skip" synchronizing these file changes.

The following types of conflicts are currently not resolvable ("source" means the original file; "target" means the resulting file):

NEW/DELETE (when target of NEW conflicts with source of DELETE). For example, when a local folder and an Oracle Files folder are in sync, and a user creates a new file in the local folder, but the folder on Oracle Files is deleted. This conflict is not currently resolvable.

NEW/COPY (when target of NEW conflicts with source or target of COPY).

NEW/EDIT (when target of NEW conflicts with target of EDIT).

NEW/MOVE (when target of NEW conflicts with source or target of MOVE).

MOVE/EDIT (when target of EDIT conflicts with source or target of MOVE).

MOVE/DELETE (when source of DELETE conflicts with source or target of MOVE).

MOVE/MOVE (when both source and target of both MOVEs cause possible conflict).

COPY/COPY (when both source and target of both COPYs cause possible conflict).

COPY/DELETE (when source of DELETE conflicts with source or target of COPY).

COPY/EDIT (when target of EDIT conflicts with source or target of COPY).

COPY/MOVE (when both source and target of COPY and MOVE cause possible conflict).

8 Documentation Issues

Some text in the Admin online help may contain outdated product naming. This material will be updated with the next release.

No information pertaining to Single-Sign-On is available in the online help for Oracle Files. This information will be included with the next release.

The Oracle Files Administration Guide contains several references to the "Oracle Files Manager." The correct term is Oracle Enterprise Manager.

9 Using Oracle Files with NFS

Depending on the specifics of your Oracle Files deployment, you may choose to perform the post-configuration task of configuring the NFS Server. This task is not required to get Oracle Files up and running.

9.1 Configure the NFS Server

There are three different configuration changes you may want to make to the Oracle Files NFS Protocol Server:

Set Up a Trusted Client List. Explicitly grants or revokes access privileges to a specific IP address (or host machine) or domains. The Trusted Client list is an Oracle-exclusive capability to enhance NFS protocol security.

Enable NIS Authentication. If your environment uses NIS for user, group, and password information, you can configure the Oracle Files NFS protocol server to use the NIS server to authenticate users.

In most environments, you should map the UNIX and Oracle Files accounts. The user account map is a domain property, and it is able to be updated dynamically--you need not restart the server to have the mappings take effect. In addition, the changes are persistent, even after you restart the server.

The Trusted Client List or NIS authentication are NFS server configuration properties. They also appear as dynamic domain properties.

Users can login once to the UNIX operating system, and then access Oracle Files without having to undergo an additional login process, as long as their UNIX accounts are mapped to Oracle Files accounts.

Click on the domain name link. The General page displays, listing the Domain Controller and nodes that comprise the domain. Toward the lower-left hand area of the page are links to Configuration objects for the domain.

Click on the Domain Properties link (under the Configuration heading). The Domain Properties page displays, listing 25 property bundles at a time. Scroll down until you find IFS.DOMAIN.PROTOCOL.NFS.UidToUserMap (you may need to move to the second or subsequent page to find this object).

Click on the hyperlinked name: IFS.DOMAIN.PROTOCOL.NFS.UidToUserMap in the list. The Edit 'IFS.DOMAIN.PROTOCOL.NFS.UidToUserMap' page displays.

By default, the UID 60001 (default UNIX guest account) is listed on the page.

Click the Add button to add a UNIX UID and create a mapping to an Oracle Files user account:

Enter the UID in the Name field.

Enter the Oracle Files user account name in the Value field.

Leave the Type setting as 'String.'

Continue adding users in this manner until you have added all users with UNIX client accounts that will access Oracle Files NFS protocol server.

Unlike service, node, and server configuration object properties, changes to the domain property are dynamically updated, so you need not restart the server. In addition, these changes persist, even after a restart.

9.1.2 Set Up a Trusted Client List

You can create a list of trusted clients for the Oracle Files to enhance security. Oracle recommends that you change these settings in the Configuration Object and then load the server on the service using the modified configuration object so that the client list is used after a restart. (Optionally, you can modify these properties dynamically).

From a Web browser, connect to the Oracle Enterprise Manager Web site running on the machine where the Oracle Files domain controller is configured:

http://<hostname>:1810

Enter the Oracle9iAS logon username and password to continue.

Enter ias_admin as the username with the appropriate password for the Oracle9iAS instance.

Click on the domain name link. The General page displays, listing the Domain Controller and nodes that comprise the domain.

Click on the Server Configurations link (under the Configuration heading). The Server Configurations page displays, listing 25 property bundles at a time. Scroll down until you find NfsServerConfiguration.

Scroll down to the Properties section of the page to the IFS.SERVER.PROTOCOL.NFS.TrustedClientList and the IFS.SERVER.PROTOCOL.NFS.TrustedClientsEnabled properties. (You may need to move to the subsequent page for these properties.)

Select the IFS.SERVER.PROTOCOL.NFS.TrustedClientsEnabled property by clicking the radio button next to its name and then clicking the Edit button. The Edit Property page for this property displays.

Change the Value from False to True (in the drop-down selector). Click OK to save the change and redisplay the Edit 'NfsServerConfiguration' page.

Select the IFS.SERVER.PROTOCOL.NFS.TrustedClientList property by clicking the radio button next to its name and then clicking the Edit button. Each entry can be specified by the following format:

Client address, specified by a hostname or an IP address, such as smith.oracle.com or 130.35.59.9

Domain suffix, specified as a string starting with a period character, for example, ".us.oracle.com".

Subnet, specified as an "@" character followed by an IP address, with an optional subnet bit length (/n) specifying the number of significant bits in the subnet address. Low order zero bytes of the subnet address may be omitted.

If an entry is preceded by a hyphen, then that specific client will be denied access through the iFS NFS server.

Click OK to save the change and redisplay the Edit 'NfsServerConfiguration' page.

Click OK to save and exit the Server Configuration page.

After modifying the NfsServerConfiguration object, you must navigate (while still in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Web interface) to the node to load the modified configuration object:

Click on the Node where the NFS protocol server (NfsServer) is running. The General page displays. The top portion of the page shows the Services, with Servers listed lower on the page.

Stop the existing NfsServer server (if one is already running on the service).

Unload this NfsServer.

Load the modified NFS protocol server object.

Start the new, modified NfsServer.

Restart the service.

See the Oracle Files Administration Guide for additional information.

9.1.3 Enable NIS Authentication

NIS (Network Information System) is a centralized management facility that consolidates UNIX password, group, and host file information. It's essentially a distributed database of information that is easier to maintain than individual files (/etc/group, /etc/passwd, /etc/hosts) in large UNIX networks.

Using a Web browser, connect to the Oracle Enterprise Manager Web site running on the machine where the Oracle Files domain controller is configured:

http://<hostname>:1810

Enter the Oracle9iAS logon username and password to continue.

Enter ias_admin as the username with the appropriate password for the Oracle9iAS instance.

Click on the domain name link. The General page displays, listing the Domain Controller and nodes that comprise the domain.

Click on the Server Configurations link (under the Configuration heading). The Server Configurations page displays, listing 25 property bundles at a time. Scroll down until you find NfsServerConfiguration.

10.1 Configuration Bugs

Oracle Text does not support Japanese lexer on AL32UTF8 databases; hence Oracle Files does not support AL32UTF8 databases for Asian languages.

Action:

Use UTF8 for the database instead of AL32UTF8.

Bug 2373885

Unable to use non-default IP addresses in cases where multiple IP addresses exist.

Description:

This problem occurs in environments where multiple IP addresses are present on a single host. The creation of the server configuration object defers to the default IP address even if a different IP address is designated.

Action:

Use the default IP address for the Oracle Files servers.

10.2 Administration Bugs

Bug 2408925

OEM should not allow illegal characters for service name.

Description:

Service Configuration objects that have ';' embedded in their names will cause problems.

Action:

None. This bug stems from a problem in the underlying OC4J layer of the software.

Bug 2417005

NLS: Some links do not work on the Oracle Files help page of OEM in IE 5.0.

Description:

Some of the help links do not work in OEM when using IE 5.0. This does not affect all pages. This problem occurs due to a limitation in the Oracle Help for the Web module that is part of the Oracle9i Application Server 9.0.2 release.

Action:

Migrate to IE 5.5, as it does not exhibit these problems.

Bug 2326481

Add Item In Shuttle in All Edit Configuration Property Page does not work.

Description:

In ServiceConfiguration and ServerConfiguration, adding items to a configuration property that is of "string_array" does not save to the system properly.

Action:

After adding item(s), be sure to re-order at least one entry. Then commit the changes.

Bug 2466795

Cannot modify the default base BFILE path used for LOB management.

Description:

The Content Agent automatically moves document content from a LOB to a BFILE for documents that have not been accessed after a specified time. By default, the agent creates the BFILES under a folder tree located at:

$ORACLE_HOME/ifs/bfile/<ifsschema>/<media>

Action:

Create a symbolic link from

$ORACLE_HOME/ifs/bfile/<ifsschema>/<media>

to point to the desired path.

Bug 2467651

Non HTTP node hangs when clicking on node link.

Description:

Clicking on the Node page in the main domain page may cause the application to hang.

Go to the OEM Website. Navigate to the iFS domain page and click on the "Node Configurations" link under the Configuration section. Click the NodeConfiguration object for the non-HTTP node, and append -XX:+OverrideDefaultLibthread to the Java Command. The java command should be appear as follows:

.../jdk/bin/java -Xmx256m -XX:+OverrideDefaultLibthread

Click OK to save the change.

Restart the non HTTP node.

10.3 NFS Bugs

Bug 1749601

Unable to chgrp in Oracle Files NFS.

Description:

A chgrp does not have any effect on mode for a file.

Action:

None. The security model is different and this has no impact.

Bug 1749621

Unable to chmod in Oracle Files NFS.

Description:

A chmod does not have any effect on mode for a file.

Action:

None. The security model is different and this has no impact.

Bug 1750049

Mode attributes cannot be set.

Description:

Cannot change the permission mode bits through Oracle Files NFS.

Action:

None. The security model is different and this has no impact.

Bug 1749778

Links cannot be created using Oracle Files NFS.

Description:

No links (symbolic, soft, or hard) can be create in Oracle Files NFS.

Action:

None. This problem is due to the nature of the underlying infrastructure.

Bug 2333774

Cannot copy files or folders where non-standard ASCII character is the first character in the name.

Description:

Folders and files that have non standard ASCII characters as the first character cannot be copied using NFS Maestro.

Action:

Use other NFS clients; this problem appears to be a Maestro limitation.

10.4 AFP Bugs

The Mac OS File-->Encrypt utility creates temporary files containing * in their names. However, Oracle Files does not allow filenames to contain an asterisk.

Action:

Do not try to encrypt a file from a Mac. Instead, encrypt the file locally, on the Mac, and then copy the encrypted file to Oracle Files through AFP.

Bug 2380571

Size of Mac file does not take into account size of resource fork.

Description:

The resource fork is not being included in size computations; thus, the size of the document may not be accurate.

Action:

None.

Bug 2463376

Finder does not refresh folder listing.

Description:

When the contents of a folder is updated by adding, removing, or modifying files, the AFP finder does not refresh the folder listing.

Action:

Log out and log back in to work around this problem.

10.5 Generic Oracle Files Bugs

Bugs 2391425, 1926886

Content searching will not return any documents if using the AL32UTF8 database character set and searching in Japanese, Chinese, or Korean.

Description:

Oracle Text currently does not support the Chinese, Japanese, or Korean lexers in a AL32UTF8 database; therefore, you cannot search on Chinese, Japanese, or Korean documents, since they are not indexed.

Depending upon your locale setting and the database session language, Oracle Files configuration may fail when the Oracle Text index is created, or the configuration may succeed but content searching on Chinese, Japanese, or Korean documents will always returns zero hits.

Action:

There are two options:

Alter your database character setting from AL32UTF to UTF8.

Install Oracle Files into a different database with a UTF8 character setting.

Bug 2442345

Purge operation in Archive Folder does not delete created Bfiles.

Description:

After the files in an archived folder are converted to BFiles, if the Subscriber Administrator does a purge operation, the BFiles are not deleted as expected.

Action:

The System Administrator can delete the operating system files manually if disk space becomes a problem.

Bug 2473166

Sorting in Browse Tables does not work in Netscape 4.7x.

Description:

Sorting by any column in a browse table in Netscape 4.7x does not sort.

Action:

Use IE 5.x and above as the browser.

Bug 2414889

Searches don't exclude AFP resource forks.

Description:

It is possible for Oracle Files Advanced Searches to include AFP resource forks in search results. Any actions performed on these files will result in an error.

Accessing Oracle Files with any other Web client will cause the user to have to login again.

Action:

To use Oracle Single-Sign-On so as to only login once, use IE 5.x and above or Netscape 4.7x as your browser.

10.6 HTTP Bugs

Bug 2337719

URLS with semi-colons return a 404 error.

Description:

URLs that have ';' embedded will cause problems.

Action:

None. This bug stems from a problem in the underlying OC4J layer of the software.

Bug 2386806

URLS with '%' in them do not work.

Description:

URLS that have '%' embedded will cause problems.

Action:

None. This bug stems from a problem in the underlying OC4J layer of the software.

Bug 2482876

Username/password prompted for three times when accessing public Word documents.

Description:

When attempting to access a public Word document without being logged in, users are prompted for username and password three times. The document is opened in read-only mode.

Action:

None.

Bug 2355830

WebDAV locking does not work with DreamWeaver 4.

Description:

Accessing content on Oracle Files from DreamWeaver 4 via WebDAV does not work properly. The first issue is that Dreamweaver 4 is not supporting the correct XML that is returned from the server. This causes Dreamweaver 4 to improperly display to the user the correct content stored on the server. Due to this problem, implicit locking of documents by Dreamweaver 4 is not supported.

Action:

Downloading a patch from Macromedia for DreamWeaver 4 will solve all but the implicit locking issue. The locking issue is still an open issue.

10.7 Windows / SMB / Print Services Bugs

Bug 1113581

Cannot delete or rename versioned files in SMB.

Description:

Attempts to delete or rename a versioned file in SMB result in a failure message indicating that all or part of the file may be locked. Certain applications, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, save their work by deleting old versions of the document. Because this would cause a loss of data attributes and compromise the versioning features of Oracle Files, the Oracle Files SMB server does not allow deletion or renaming of versioned files.

Action:

Use the Web interface to delete the file.

Bug 2472522

Windows generates multiple print jobs.

Description:

Certain versions of Windows create multiple print jobs in Oracle Files when the user requests to print a single document. These extra print jobs have no content, and will not result in paper use. They will, however, show up in the queue for a short period of time. The correct document will still be printed.

Action:

None.

Bug 2344972

Cannot print to printer that is restricted by username and password.

Description:

When connecting to a printer from Windows NT/2000, the user is not prompted for a username and password. If the share is restricted by a username and password, then the user will not be able to print.

Action:

There are two courses of action:

Before mounting the printer, map a network drive to a file share on the same server. When the user is prompted for his username and password, enter the same username and password that will subsequently be used for accessing the printer.

Before mounting the printer, open a DOS prompt and enter:

> net use \\<server-name>\<printer-name>
<password> /USER:<username>

Then mount the printer, using the exact same name for the printer share.

Bug 2424896

Server property for enablying printing does not appear in SMB Server Configuration

Description:

In order to enable printing via SMB, the Oracle Files administrator must set a property to specifically enable the sharing of printers. This property will not be listed automatically as one of the SMB server configuration properties.

Action:

The Oracle Files administrator must manually add the IFS.SERVER.PROTOCOL.SMB.EnablePrinting property and set its value to TRUE.

10.8 Oracle FileSync Bugs

Bug 2439362

Installer upgrades existing Oracle FileSync client without asking.

Description:

The Oracle FileSync installation program does not warn users before upgrading the client. This new client can only to be used with Oracle Collaboration Suite.

Action:

In order to access any older Oracle Internet File System or Oracle Content Management SDK servers, please use the client shipped with those products.

Bug 2374879

Server-side folders with the percent (%) character in their names are not synchronized.

Description:

Folders and files that have '%'s embedded in their names will not be synchronized during the sync process.

Action:

None. This bug stems from a problem in the underlying OC4J layer of the software.

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